Fun fact about me: I don’t really care about difficulty in games. Or, more accurately, I don’t think difficulty has much to do with how good a game is. Many of my favorite games are difficult: Hollow Knight, Tunic, Celeste, Rain World—these are games with unforgiving precision or obscure progression, or both. But then, just as many of my favorite games are not particularly challenging: role-playing games, exploration games, interactive narratives, and poetic journeys—games like Citizen Sleeper, Sable, Gone Home, Flower, or Jusant. What really matters to me as a player is a clear and well-executed vision, and most important of all, how effectively a game engages my interest. My favorite games are the ones I can’t wait to get back to and the ones that stay with me long after they are over.
Akatori is a difficult game, but not for the reasons it wants to be. This is not difficulty as artistic vision. Hardship stems instead from unpredictability and inconsistency with a simultaneous inflexibility about player approach. The game doesn’t suffer from a poverty of ideas, but every good idea seems to have been only halfway implemented, and its commendable qualities are overshadowed by sloppy design and shaky deployment.
I was initially taken in by the aesthetic. For the first 30 minutes or so of play I was reveling in the beautiful presentation and atmosphere of each locale. If skill points were allocated to different aspects of development, this game was heavily specced into visual style. Akatori has pixel art so detailed that it can pass for hand-drawn art at a medium distance. The lighting, the colors, the backgrounds: they are all foreboding and vibrant and crafted with a skillful eye. The music, consisting of strings and woodwinds, was serviceable if not memorable and achieved an appropriate mystical accompaniment for the art style. I don’t usually throw the word “charm” around, but this game’s got it. I have nothing but flattering things to say about the way Akatori looks.
As the narrative and gameplay develop, the charm begins to wither. Mako, the game’s protagonist, is a guide(?) for a temple(?) devoted to a god(?) named Akatori. Early on, Mako meets this ostensible god, who possesses the ability to change form into various weapons and tools, and she proceeds to platform through a series of caves and mines in pursuit of… well, in order to… um. I guess she’s eventually trying to get rid of a destructive fictional substance called amber? Er wait—that’s actually what Akatori is trying to do. Listen, I would summarize, but I am so confused about why anyone does anything during the course of this game that I’m at a loss for a cogent synopsis.
Mako lives among monk-like figures at a temple, and the nature of their beliefs and practices is left unexplained, but combat and escorting soldiers through some sort of mirror dimension seems to be a part of it. Not long into the game, everybody dies, but Mako is not particularly torn up about it. I’d have expected that the genocide of her community would have a profound effect. Not so.
Then there is the eponymous Akatori, shaped like a bird and nominally a god, but I’m not sure what “god” means in this context. One conversation implies that he was once a mortal who became a god through scientific experiment, but this is never substantiated or explored. Another conversation implies that he has the ability to create an afterlife but didn’t get around to it. The extent of his powers and knowledge is cloudy, and his origins are similarly unexplained. He’s also just kind of a dickhead: an unpleasant traveling companion, heartless and cold toward his worshippers as well as Mako and even those he has evident past relationships with, and this is an attitude that is not well supported by his elusive and overarching motives.
Mako simply goes wherever Akatori tells her to go with no stated objective, and I could not for the life of me put myself into whatever state of mind she was supposed to have in order to want to do this. The salient lore of the story is backloaded into the last 20 minutes of play during a cutscene with the final boss (introduced at the eleventh hour), and one could retroactively assign meaning to various character choices, but the story does not ultimately click so much as make you squint. At one point you have the option to get a joke ending by trading Akatori for a snowboard, and this is my canon.
Meanwhile, the text during cutscenes is a little too slow and cannot be sped up (this looks to have been patched, as of writing). The font is also quite small with no setting to increase the size, so rejoice if you, like me, love to be reminded of your age. The writing is riddled with typos, and what writing there is can be perplexing in its intention. At one point the protagonist makes some sort of pun combining “serpent” and “compassion” into “serpentassion,” and I could not for all my money glean the intended joke. Something lost in translation? I stopped the game for a moment and pondered and came up short.
Mako starts the game armed with nothing but her fists, a dodge roll, and a generous double jump. That double jump feels great: the character soars, and the second jump can be activated anytime during ascent or descent, with a longer press granting a higher jump, which gives the player precise control over a huge vertical range. The combat also feels pretty good at the start—there is a satisfying risk/reward getting in real close with enemies and punching them, and Mako has a stocky weight that translates to satisfying connections. I am still reminiscing about that first half hour of play when I thought I was playing a game intending to deliver on its promises.
Everything goes downhill once Mako picks up her staff, aka Akatori. I won’t bore you with a long list of gripes about the platforming and combat. (pauses) What’s that? (pauses again) Ah, I’m being told by my editors that everyone just scrolls to the bottom of the review anyway, and I can just write whatever I want in the body here, so scratch that. Let’s get this bellyaching show on the road:
The controls are sluggish, with attacks and other inputs sometimes taking a beat too long to respond.
I-frames are negligible, if they even exist, and you can go from full health to no health in an instant after a single mistake puts you in harm’s way.
Some hazards are offscreen and will kill you before you even see them, especially in the water.
There is no way to level up, so there is no way to better steel yourself against a platforming gauntlet of erratic and unpredictable hazards.
Checkpoints have purposeless placement, with some directly next to each other and others placed before or after multiple unreasonably long gauntlets.
New abilities on the ability tree are a pointless pain to unlock, as one must kill a lot of enemies without saving or dying in order to access a trial in order to kill a whole bunch more enemies without saving or dying in order to end up with a weak new ability that has a trivial impact on combat. There is no good reason to do this. No unlockable ability is essential or super useful; they take energy to use, and they don’t even work reliably, as I found when I paused in one location and tried for several minutes to work out a consistent button combination for my new rapid attack to wildly mercurial results.
The wall cling is unbearably sticky. If you so much as graze a surface, you will stick to it, and the game will not let you release and drop straight down, so if down is your intended direction, you will slowly and powerlessly inch down the wall at a borderline hilarious pace, even if you are being attacked point blank by multiple combatants.
Let’s see, what else? Video stutters significantly around late game save points, which is mildly irksome. That might be it.
I do not recommend Akatori. Outside of some gorgeous visual presentation, there is little satisfying substance. The dialogue contains plenty of intrigue without payoff. The game is frustrating, not in a way that entices you to try again, but in a way that makes you sigh and roll your eyes. I was able to complete the campaign in less than 8 hours, making the game at least mercifully pretty short.
